MOVIE • 1992

My Mother Thought She Was Audrey Hepburn

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In this funny and sometimes irreverent journey through San Francisco's Chinatown, Suzanne comes to terms with her own ethnic identity. This film is a personal statement about growing up Asian-American in a white society. Suzanne was brought up "not to be Chinese." All traces of her family's Chinese culture and traditions were to be left in China. Her mother was proud to dress like Audrey Hepburn or Jackie Kennedy, thinking she had attained the American dream if she modeled herself after them. Though she never became an active member of white society, she unwittingly fostered a "Chinese self-hatred" in her daughter.The film suggests that racial stereotypes are imprisoning whether the minority person rebels against them or conforms. Thus Suzanne, after mindlessly alternating between a series of different self images, goes full circle, accepting, at last, her ethnic heritage.